About

We make ‘em like they used to

Harry F. Olson

The story begins in the 1930’s at RCA* with Harry Olson developing the 44 and 77 series ribbon microphones. Mr. Olson was followed in his post by engineer Jon R. Sank, for whom the JRS-34 is named. He was charged by RCA with improving on Harry’s best mics. He did just that with the BK-11, a direct descendant of the 44 series. It’s been an inside audio secret for many years among top engineers that the BK-11 is the most advanced ribbon microphone in the world.

Jon Sank passed away in 1998, but before he died he passed more than 50 years of skill and technology to his son, Stephen Sank. Trained by his father beginning at age 10, Stephen’s studies continued to build upon lessons learned from the original RCA Laboratory Studies.

Today, Stephen and his wife Cynthia continue the family tradition of developing quality hand crafted ribbon microphones in collaboration with Cloud Microphones. The Cloud JRS-34, with modern appointments such as neodymium magnets and Cinemag transformers takes the next evolutionary step in the immortal BK-11 and 44 series microphone design line.

RJ Cloud & Stephen Sank

All Cloud products are completely built in the USA. Most parts are fabricated locally with our partner company Aerofab, inc. Each microphone is then assembled by hand at our manufacturing lab in Tucson, Arizona. The ribbons are all cut, corrugated, and installed by hand in precisely the same manner and with the same care that Harry Olson prescribed at RCA, when ribbon microphones were first introduced. Each individual mic is thoroughly inspected for sound quality and craftsmanship and no corners are cut in this process. The result is a beautiful completely hand crafted high quality ribbon microphone.

*RCA is a registered trademark of Radio Corporation of America. References to RCA are historical in nature and imply no affiliation with Cloud Microphones.